Dr. Lynette Jones is a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her PhD from McGill University. Her research is focused on understanding how the skin senses the environment and determining how it can be used effectively as a medium of communication. This entails research on characterizing the properties of different actuators used in tactile and thermal displays, building and testing different types of displays, evaluating the mechanical properties of skin and human perceptual studies. From 2014-2019 she was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics. She received the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics Distinguished Service Award in 2021. She is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Dr. Hsin-Ni Ho is an Associate Professor at Kyushu University, Japan, with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She specializes in developing haptic interfaces based on human perception. She models the heat transfer processes during hand-object interactions and studies how resulting changes in skin temperature are processed by the brain and integrated with other sensory inputs to form a unified percept of touch. Her work on multisensory integration with temperature perception has been published in top journals in the fields of haptics, neuroscience and psychology and covered by Scientific American. She has experiences in organizing workshops in top conferences, such as Eurohaptics and SIGCHI.

Jin Ryong Kim is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and M.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University. He also received a M.S. and B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Hanyang University, Korea. His research interests include haptics and VR, emphasizing interactive technologies by utilizing human sensory capabilities. He's been an associate editor of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, guest editor of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics, and guest editor of Frontiers in VR. He received an IEEE RA-L Outstanding Associate Editor Award in 2022.

Pedro Lopes is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Pedro focuses on integrating interfaces with the human body—exploring the interface paradigm that supersedes wearables. These include: muscle stimulation wearables that allow users to manipulate tools they have never seen before or that accelerate reaction time, or a device that leverages the smell to create an illusion of temperature. Pedro’s work has received several academic awards, such as five CHI/UIST Best Papers, Sloan Fellowship and NSF CAREER, and captured the interest of the public (e.g., New York Times, exhibited at Ars Electronica, etc.; more: https://lab.plopes.org.

Allison Okamura is the Richard W. Weiland Professor of Engineering at Stanford University in the mechanical engineering department, with a courtesy appointment in computer science. She received her degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. She is an IEEE Fellow and a deputy director of the Wu Tsai Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Her awards include the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award, and Duca Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Her academic interests include haptics, teleoperation, virtual reality, medical robotics, soft robotics, rehabilitation, and education.

Yasemin Vardar is an Assistant Professor at TU Delft (Netherlands). Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the MPI for Intelligent Systems (Germany); she earned her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Koç University (Turkey) in 2018. Her research interests focus on understanding human touch and developing haptic interface technologies. She received the 2021 NWO VENI Grant, the 2018 Eurohaptics Best Ph.D. Thesis Award, IEEE WHC 2017 Best Poster Presentation Award, and TUBITAK Ph.D. Fellowship; she was selected for the 2019 Sign Up! Career-building Program. She is currently a co-chair of the Technical Committee on Haptics.